DESCRIPTION

These routines are used to step through the continuation references in a
result chain received from
ldap_result(3)
or the synchronous LDAP search operation routines.

The
ldap_first_reference()
routine is used to retrieve the first reference message in a
result chain. It takes the result as returned by a call to
ldap_result(3),ldap_search_s(3)
or
ldap_search_st(3)
and returns a pointer to the first reference message in the
result chain.

This pointer should be supplied on a subsequent call to
ldap_next_reference()
to get the next reference message, the result of which should be
supplied to the next call to
ldap_next_reference(),
etc.
ldap_next_reference()
will return NULL when there are no more reference messages.
The reference messages returned from these calls are used by
ldap_parse_reference(3)
to extract referrals and controls.

A count of the number of reference messages in the search result can be
obtained by calling
ldap_count_references().
It can also be used to count the number of reference messages remaining
in a result chain.

ERRORS

If an error occurs in
ldap_first_reference()
or
ldap_next_reference(),
NULL is returned. If an error occurs in
ldap_count_references(),
-1 is returned.